The art of manufacturing flat, glued, folded paper boxes, termed "flats" herein has progressed to the extent that folding and gluing machines produce the same at such high speed that it becomes a problem for the packaging operators, at the end of the stacking aprons, to keep up with production.
The flats advance along the stacker apron, or conveyor, in shingled formation, with every 50th flat counted and kicked slightly laterally out of the longitudinal shingled formation, so that the packaging operators can visually note what is called herein a lift, of fifty flats, or some other desired number thereof, reach over the stacking apron and grip between both hands as many as consitute a convenient lift and carry successive lifts manually over into an empty carton, until a slug, or row, is achieved in the carton.
It will be apparent that a slug of one or more lifts of fifty flats is normally more than one operator can handle in one trip and is like an accordian in that if great compression pressure is not used, or if one part of each flat is extra thick to form a bulge, or if the operator, usually a woman, becomes tired or careless a slug can easily become deformed and the flats fall all over the floor. While picking up such flats, the stacker continues to feed shingled flats to the operator so that the need for a practical packaging apparatus, capable of handling entire slugs at a time, becomes apparent to assure against such mishaps and to match the speed of production.
It has been proposed in Preisig U.S. Pat. No. 3,943,681 of Mar. 16, 1976 to position a plurality of stacked flats on a slideable closure, and over a container, and to then open the closure to drop the flats into the container.
It has also been proposed in Joa U.S. Pat. No. 4,141,193 of Feb. 27, 1979 to advance a group of diapers along a path up to a back stop fixed at the end of the path, a compression ram being poised outside the path but moveable by power into the path to compress the diapers. The compressed diapers are then power rammed laterally into a funnel and thence into an empty carton lying on its side. There appears to be no space at the compression station for an operator to inspect quality.
There have been many proposed machines for automatically receiving filled packages and inserting such packages into cartons. However, such machines would not be acceptable in the folding paper box are because, despite the high speed production of a folding and gluing machine, it is considered essential that an operator have an opportunity to inspect each slug, or group, of glued flats, to turn the slug over and remove any defectively glued flats before permitting the slug to be packed in a shipping carton.
Applicant is aware of a tear sheet (copy submitted with this application) entitled "JAGENBERG" with heading in English "Simple Folding Box Packing Station EFA-1, suited for all folding box gluers, for higher outputs with only one operator at the delivery end" believed to be of 1971 vintage. It is not known how this machine was intended to operate, or whether it reached the market, but the empty cases are right side up on an upper chain, out of reach of an operator. The slugs may move down around a curved path through an angle of 90.degree. as in Jagenberg Patents to Klapp, U.S. Pat. No. 4,249,360 of 1981. The empty cases are already erected with the bottom flaps closed, while the empty cases, handled in this invention, are in flat, open tubular form to avoid use of excessive storage space.